>Friday Five, 6/4/2010

>Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Five. It’s been a big baseball week… oh, and there’s a couple other things going on as well.

5) Stanley Cup Finals

This begins a stretch of things that are pretty important in the sports world, but I don’t care too much about. Last on the list because I’m pretty sure it is less important than Olympic hockey is the Stanley Cup Finals between the Blackhawks and Flyers. How ignored is it? I had to click 3 pages into ESPN.com to find out who even won Game 3 the other night. It drew the highest Stanley Cup Finals rating in 8 years… on Versus. Wow, people, just wow.

4) NBA Finals

The NBA Finals opened up in Los Angeles last night with the Lakers taking Game 1, 102-89. The big question coming into the Finals is whether or not the Lakers can be physical enough to handle Boston’s physicality. Of course, with Ron Artest on the Lakers, Maria Menounos may want to watch her trash talking. He has not qualms about going into the stands after unruly fans.

3) French Open

France is currently peeing its pants with excitement. There are only two reasons why I will mention France – the Open and the Maginot Line. The ironic thing is that both were set up as defenses against the Germans, and neither one of them kept the Germans out because they simply ignored both. The women’s final is going to be a thrilling match between Schiavone and Stosur…. wait, who? The men’s final is yet to be determined, but let’s face it, Nadal is going to win.

2) Ken Griffey Jr. retires

Things are going so bad in Seattle that they finally beat down one of baseball’s greatest players. In an interview with Tim Kurkjan, put him as the #5 centerfielder of all time behind Mays, Cobb, DiMaggio and Mantle. I’d say that’s pretty good company. Griffey hasn’t been playing well this season and was benched, then two teammates went to the papers saying that he fell asleep during a game. After that, apparently, he became withdrawn and wasn’t the fun-loving guy that we came to love in the ’90’s. In a seriousness, good-bye to one of the game’s greats.

1) Armando Galarraga gets the shaft.

Unbelievable. Armando Galarraga, pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, lost a perfect game on the final out because the umpire thought the runner beat the throw to first. After seeing the replay, Jim Joyce realized that he got the call wrong, and has been a fire hydrant of tears ever since. Commissioner Bud Selig came out yesterday to say that he wasn’t going to overturn the call and give Galarraga a perfect game, even though that probably would be the right thing to do. You can’t have the Commish overturning every bad call, he apparently has other things to do… like make the All Star game “count.”